


Copper and Cake

by prinxe



Series: Last Stone's Day [1]
Category: Acquisitions Inc., The "C" Team
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Holidays, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 21:19:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19384864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prinxe/pseuds/prinxe
Summary: Last Stone's Day used to be fun.





	Copper and Cake

It is sickeningly sweet, and smells like nothing. No tart hint of berry, no rich chocolate. It is a flavorless pile of mush in his palm that reeks of sugar and little else.

It’s not for eating, Omin reasons. It’s never been for eating. This doesn’t stop the younger children, of course. His own sister, Portentia, has shoved three handfuls into her mouth, getting most of it on her face, before their mother, Audra, scolded her for ruining her appetite. 

He carefully pinches some of the cake between his thumb and forefinger, smashes it up into smaller and smaller crumbs, until all he can see or feel is the residual stickiness of compressed cake on his fingertips.

Someone to his left takes a half jog start, stops at the edge of the quarry and hucks a piece of cake as hard as she possibly can into it. She shrieks too gleefully,  _ Victor _ , before the confetti of cake and crumbs hits the ground below. This repeats, one child after another. Some are his age. Most much younger. All of them shouting a name of a loved one that had passed this year or, barring that, in the years before. A chorus of names,  _ Prin _ ,  _ Ionis _ ,  _ Beeadrix _ ,  _ Grandma _ ,  _ Linwood _ .

_ It’s morbid,  _ Omin thinks for the first time. It’s morbid to find this much joy in it, to celebrate it.

Portentia has stopped trying to eat her remaining handfuls of cake and has taken to throwing small bits into trees to try and coax down the squirrels, who are curious about the food but wary of the people. 

Omin crushes the cake in his palm and lets his hand fall to his side, watching as fat pieces of cake fly over his head to land with unsatisfactory plops against the rocks below.

“Ain’tcha throwin’ it?”

He turns to his right and gives Galabast, a boy a few years older than him, a withering look. “No.”

“What about your--”

_ “No,”  _ Omin says, firmer, before turning back to watch the crumbs and piles of mush shatter against the stones below. Some of the older boys try to throw cake as far as they physically can to impress the girls, before one of them handily beats their best attempt with a single throw. 

Galabast had been hovering around them, too old to play with the smaller children, but too young for the teenagers to do much more than tolerate his orbit. He has in one fist some cake, for throwing, and in his other hand a larger piece that he is eating away at like it is an apple. Omin suspects that when the piece started it was twice the size it was now. There’s evidence of it all around Galabast’s mouth.

“Fine then.” Galabast makes an effort to lick up a crumb he simply assumes is there at the corner of his mouth, and is rewarded justly. “I’ll do it. Someone’s gotta.”

Omin feels a feeling he’s been feeling a lot, as of late. A flare of dread, of anger, so quick and so fierce that it chills his ears and closes his throat. His chest tightens when Galabast takes a step back and winds up for the throw.

Galabast doesn’t get through  _ Aus-- _ before he is tackled to the ground and punched in the face, as hard as Omin has ever punched anything, shouting a  _ no _ with such ferocity it barely sounds like the word. 

Galabast shrieks, at first, then laughs in disbelief. “The fu-- your sister’s  _ dead, _ you godsdamn knife ear!”

Omin sees red and strikes him again, trying to swallow down the memories of the last time he fought someone like this, the last time he punched anyone. Tamps down the picture of his sister’s face, scrunched up and growling after being caught off guard by an attack before she kicks the absolute  _ shit _ out of her twin brother.  _ You can’t even win when you cheat, Niffy. _

He knows he’s yelling something at Galabast, because he can feel his throat going raw with the effort, but he can’t hear himself over the anger vibrating in his blood, pounding in his neck. Over the din of his pulse in his ears, he thinks he might hear Portentia yelling his name.

Omin doesn’t so much as feel his mother’s arms wrap around his chest and pull him off the other boy, leaving him to kick uselessly out at Galabast.

“Go,” Audra hisses, and Galabast shrinks under her glare, wiping some blood from his lip before running off and worming his way between the legs of some adults. He leaves behind the two pieces of cake, crushed into the dirt and stone, unfit to be eaten or thrown. Omin goes limp in his mother’s arms, but cannot stop staring at the one meant for his sister.

“Ominifis!” Audra lets his feet touch the ground before letting him go, only to hook her hand over his and drag him through a crowd of whispers and barely averted glances. She slows only to meet Waelvur’s eye, who, to his credit,  _ knows _ his son. He nods and takes Galabast the other direction, and Audra is internally grateful that the holiday will continue as planned, and hopes that they needn’t bring this up to Propha until the morning.

She stops by a large, shaded tree, one of the last Red Larch trees  _ in  _ Red Larch, and kneels to Omin’s level. He tries not to pout; fails.

“What is the matter with you,” Audra says, and Omin knows better than to answer because it’s not a question. She pulls a handkerchief from her bosom and takes it to Omin’s lip. He’s aware, suddenly, that Galabast had hit him  _ back, _ and only now does he realize it hurts, and hurts all over.

“I’m sorry.” He winces as she swipes some blood off his cheek.

She dabs roughly at his lip and he clenches and unclenches his fists. They still feel too sugary, too sweet. He can smell it, still, but it’s mixing with the blood. Copper and cake.

He sniffs up a heavy droplet of blood threatening to drip off his upper lip, and Audra tsks him wordlessly before pinching his nose with the handkerchief despite his protests. “Blow.”

“Mom, I can do this  _ myself _ I can just  _ heal _ it--” 

_ “Blow,” _ she repeats, and he relents. She pinches his nostrils for a split second and wipes away what blood she can. “It’s not worth bothering Tymora for. Omin, what has gotten into you? You can’t just--”

“He  _ started  _ it,” Omin hisses fiercely, fists tightening.

“I don’t care.” She takes his face between both hands and tilts his head in every direction, looking for more scrapes and cuts.

Omin looks at her face, while she is preoccupied. Studies it. Her expression has always been impossible to read. Unlike Propha, Audra’s face contains multitudes, her emotions many, and all of them nuanced.

“Are you going to tell mom?”

“Not tonight.”

“But you’re--”

“Yes.” She relaxes her hands, but keeps them in place, meeting his eye purposefully. Audra’s expression softens. “Ominifis, sweetie, you can’t just...fight people who make you angry.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Omin mumbles. She smooths his hair back and he furrows his brow, breaking eye contact as he thinks.

“Mom, what’s a--” Omin tries to remember the words Galabast had used. He remembers the feeling they instilled, first, and then they come. “What’s a… a knife ear?”

Audra’s eyebrows jump. “Where did you hear that?”   
“Galabast called me a knife ear. Am I a--”

“No!” She pulls Omin into a hug and squeezes him tight. He hugs back and squirms until he finds a comfortable way to let himself be folded into it. “He shouldn’t have called you that. It’s not kind.”

Omin closes his eyes and breathes in her perfume. Lemongrass and smoke, and salt. She smells like travel. She smells far away. It’s enough to overpower the lingering taste and smell of copper on his tongue. “What’s it mean?”

Audra pets his head, smoothes back his hair, slow and steady. “Sometimes other races call elves that, but it’s unkind. It’s cruel.”

He reaches up and brushes his fingers over his ear, small but pointed. Pouts. “I’m not an _ elf.” _

“It doesn’t matter. People who talk like that are ignorant. Galabast is ignorant.” She squeezes Omin harder, and kisses the top of his head. “Is that why you punched him?”

Omin considers the shape of the lie he’s about to tell, finds it satisfactory. “Yes.”

He pulls himself out of the hug long enough for Audra to sit down on the grass. She pats the space between her legs and he takes it, leaning instinctively back into another embrace. She speaks Elvish, now, and Omin’s ears perk up at the sound, at how lyrical and magical every word she says sounds in it. “Oh, songbird.”

Omin closes his eyes and sighs into her neck, listening intently as his mother hums a song thick with magic. He suspects it is Calm Emotions, by the way his muscles relax and his heart stops pounding. He couldn’t resist the spell if he tried, and doesn’t bother to. “My little songbird.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles again, this time meaning it. Audra kisses his forehead, then presses a second kiss a hair lower, between his eyebrows.

“I’ll explain everything to your mother tonight,” Audra murmurs, bringing their foreheads together. Omin leans into it, like a kitten bunting its mother. “Propha will understand.”

He suspects she won’t. He suspects, instead, that Propha will simply know that he lashed out for a completely different reason, and that she will know precisely what that reason was. Propha knows everything.

“Momma, momma!” 

Omin cranes his neck to look over his shoulder at Portentia, running up to them, the fattest squirrel he’s ever seen in her hands. She grins and shakes it around, despite the high, screeching protest from the animal. “Look!”

Audra and Omin speak in near unison. “Tentia, sweetheart, put that down--”

“You’re gonna get bit.”

“Nuh uh!” Portentia insists. “‘Sides, it already bit me.”

Audra groans, wilting against Omin, who does not laugh but wants to. “Tentia…”

“He’s the king!”

“He’s vermin.”

“Bow to him!”

“Tentia…”

“I said bow!!”


End file.
